The one with the Sketches, Part 2

I can’t keep posting parts to the The one with the Sketches, so I just created another blog.

It’s my third active blog, and its dedicated to sketches. I don’t know if I suck at sketches, but it sure is fun. Sketching is so cool. porn isn’t fashionable anymore.

SoC update

here.

Three down

I’ve been pretty pathetic at, umm, deprecating email ids and IM ids. Because of Pidgin (and earlier Gaim) I’ve not found the need to move around all my friends from one ID to the other. And hence for around the last four years, I’ve had one hotmail ID, and two yahoo IDs. For around the last three years I’ve had one jabber (because at that time Gtalk was not fully compatible with XMPP networks), and then came one more Gtalk ID (when I eventually decided to shift from rediffmail to Gmail), and one more Gtalk ID (when Orkut decided to integrate itself with Gtalk).

Anyway, it soon gets pretty messy. And my friends start complaining about my multiple identities too. So sometime back I had created a small command line PHP script to extract all my buddies from ~/.purple/blist.xml. I finally got down to using it today, since I happened to learn about the command comm, which has made comparing my buddy-lists easy (diff doesn’t do a good job — it wasn’t made for the purpose).

So for example, to get rid of my friends in arniekarnievarnie_isthatenough, I did the folowing:

~$ cd .purple
~/.purple$ ./listall.php arniekarnievarnie_isthatenough | sort |uniq > arnie_list
~/.purple$ ./listall.php arnstein87 | sort | uniq > arnstein_list
~/.purple$ comm arnie_list arnstein_list | less

So now I have a list of friends who are in my arniekarnievarnie_isthatenough account, and who are not on arnstein87 account. Neat. I still have to do some manual work, to make sure these guys are not gtalk friends, before going about wasting their time and adding them to my arnstein87 list.

I also did the same to get rid of my arnstein@jabber.org account. And to top it up, I take great pleasure in announcing that I have got rid of my MSN account forever.

The one with the Backup

December 2007 (Bangalore, Delhi, Amritapuri)

Collection of everything

The one with the Random Rants

Suddenly the world looks very cruel.

If the Creation is to be taken as true, then God made just one mistake — he created woman (better known as girl, chic, female, or bitch in our male lingo. For the sake of standardization, we’ll call them just females. Bitches will refer to a particular class of females. Females reading this post should immediately press Ctrl+W for some interesting javascript effects).

If you’ve reached this line, you’re definitely a guy.

Classification

I would never have made such a chauvinist statement, say around three to four months ago. Of course there are a few idiots, I would claim, but you can’t generalize that to all females. Now a female lacking common sense doesn’t bother me as much as a bitching, pain-in-the-assing female. All females that I’ve met in the last few months have been bitches. I’ve lost all hope in female-kind.

I will now generalize, without proof.

All females are one or more of the following: a retard, a snob, or a bitch. Profound Fact 1.

I’ll give just one example. In The One with the Chatroom Logs, I had mentioned the involvement of a chic.

The Story of the Rediffbol Chic

Now here’s this female calling me one night asking me whether I have documentation for my Rediffbol plugin. Am not sure what made me happier — that somebody was actually interested in the code I had so painfully created, or that here was a chic who I have some chance to impress with my talent. (Of course, I thought in the long term too, she stayed in Vijayawada, not too far away … so easy to screw)

Miss interested-in-my-code-documentation turns out to be a Spammer Chic, without any idea of programming (I regret having used words like “doxygen” the first time she called). A first year B.Com students who posts Google Adsense ads to people on Rediffbol, who in turn click those ads, and she gets money. She claimed to have earned 7K that month. She gets the IDs from people who are logged into chatrooms. The scheme is brilliant: Google does not check Rediffbol for such adsense abusers. OTOH, [apparently, according to her] Google does keep track of Yahoo chatrooms.

Now with a mix of seduction and an offer of 5K INR, she convinces me to write a script to automate this task. I sort of partially did write it, and she wasn’t satisfied enough, so I sweetly said fuck off.

(This starts sounding more mafia like, once you know that the chic has a boyfriend, perhaps a king-pin in the business. Knowing that also reduces interest in continuing working for her.)

This bitch had actually called me on my mobile quite a few times, and we did chat some regular-life stuff. But the thing that made this female a bitch, was her irritating way of telling me: What’s taking you so long? I know you can do it in few minutes if you want to.

And that everytime she called me, even though she talked of life in general, eventually she would end up trying to convince me to work harder for her.

Bitch.

Its My Life.

Have you ever stopped and wondered whose life you’re living? You’re not living yours. Your interests are not yours. My interests are not mine. Now I wonder whether I like movies and books and even blogging, for what they are — or am I just doing that to look intelligent. Do I drink alcohol just to look cool — to be called a wine connoisseur, to be accepted among people? Am I going for my PhD just because everybody else is going. Is my taste of music and clothes dependent on what my roomie claims is to be in fashion? I am not sure myself. I make myself out to be this cool outgoing guy when I’m talking to girls — I’m not. When chatting with a male friend, I make myself out to be a guy who has a hundred lingeried women around him. Can I hear you calling me pathetic? I’m sure you’re the same. You’re as pathetic as me. I’m reminded of the Woody Allen movie, Zelig (there.. I did it again :/). We try to adapt to the people around us.

I will now confess the truth about the real me.

Just give me emacs and gcc and leave me on a deserted island and that would be my ideal life. Profound Fact 2: I’m a loser. But by writing this, I lose in style.

If you’re a girl and you’re reading this, I think my chances of impressing you have fallen by about 75%. Good.

The one where Domino’s is Very Happy

… after all, the next generations of CMIites have lots of money to spend.

The one with the chatroom logs

Ever written a script to automatically message everybody in a chat room? Ah, well, I did that on a rediffmail account. (There’s more to this story. There’s a chic. There’s money. I’ll post about that later ;) ). Anyway, I’m actually surprised that there are real people out there. Real desperate people. I got a dozen “asl?” messages back. I decided to have some fun: (for clarification, although my id is shown as arnstein here, I was using some near random text as a nickname…)


watchingbluefilmcurrently@rediffmail.com: hi
arnstein@rediffmail.com: no hi from me
watchingbluefilmcurrently@rediffmail.com: asl pls
arnstein@rediffmail.com: umm.. I'm a guy, and I'm gay. so you gay too?
watchingbluefilmcurrently@rediffmail.com: no so bye


And…


sonu_bly5656@rediffmail.com: hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
arnstein@rediffmail.com: you're evidently jobless
sonu_bly5656@rediffmail.com: i am a student
arnstein@rediffmail.com: ah, well, then asl?
sonu_bly5656@rediffmail.com: what r u doing at this time
arnstein@rediffmail.com: sorry to hurt your feelings, but now fuck off...
sonu_bly5656@rediffmail.com: what r u saying
arnstein@rediffmail.com: you a guy or girl?
sonu_bly5656@rediffmail.com: boy
arnstein@rediffmail.com: that's why fuck off, lets continue preying on our unsuspecting female friends instead of wasting time with each other


The one about The Game

As you might guess from the date of this post, I have spent quite a few hours on orkut and Facebook since quite early in the morning (“female”, “female chennai”, “female date”, …).

I have a theory.

Orkut and Facebook, and all other social networking sites are games. Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Games. The game begins with zero friends, and you need to build up a friends list with continuous playing. It requires great patience, and great strategy. Some games have other sub-goals. Eventually all of these add up, with some sophisticated formula, to be the coolness factor.

Unfortunately, as with all games, people tend to get bored. Some people realize that they are no longer in the race, and so they claim (and make themselves believe) that Game Orkut is a pathetic game for losers, and say hello to Game Facebook. Some more pathetic souls would move on to lesser known sites which love spamming innocent players like you.

Then there’s the other class of master strategists who believe that Game Orkut is passe. For kids. For the lesser mortals. And they claim so loudly. They point at you and laugh. And move over to Game Facebook. Sexier, larger, and of course — the Americans use it.

And now they have an all new game, they can test their skills right from the start. They build their empires from scratch. Ah! the excitement!

As games, there’s a major difference between Orkut and Facebook. Facebook is a game that evolves. There are more components to the game. Consider the difference between playing, say Tic-tac-toe and Chess. Chess has many more pieces. The game lasts longer. There are more decisions to make. Its harder to predict the outcome. Its more challenging.

The Chess pieces in Facebook are the “Applications”. Right now I see many of these Chess pieces in my Facebook account: “Compare yourself with friends”, “Coolest friends”, “Hottie request”… As mentioned earlier, victory is a complex formula of all of these.

On the other hand, everybody stops playing Tic-tac-toe.

(I have liked orkut not as a game, but for its simplicity. It achieves what it is meant for, with just an “X” and “O”. I have joined Facebook in the past few months because all the hot chics are there. Yes, yes — hot chics are very aggressive players. And I like ogling. Yet, I pledge allegiance to Orkut. May Google rule the world.)

Liferea

I had started using Google Reader for my reading feeds from about a month back, it took me till yesterday to discover that it actually doesn’t work properly because of my having multiple google accounts.

After many apt-cache searchs, I finally found this little publicized feed reader called Liferea.

Now for a start, its free software, and its written in C with Gtk+, and is pretty light. It integrates well with the gnome desktop, and uses gnome-notifications to inform you of new messages. Compare that with using Akregator (Qt based) on Gnome.

The brilliance doesn’t stop here, it allows you to add your Google Reader account as part of your feeds. So for those on the move, you can store all your reading list on Google Reader and simply use Liferea to read them while you’re on your home machine.

Liferea allows you to run a script on the feeds (the XML content to be specific) before it processes it. So for example, The Hindu’s news feeds don’t have the news articles stored on them, only a summary of the news. Now I can write a script (and in fact have already written!) to download the actual news content (looking at the URI of the news, which RSS already provides) and replacing the item description with that. I don’t need to worry about the detail so downloading or whether the feed has been updated. How cool is that?

Liferea also allows you to store, in some sense, a Search query as a feed. This means that I can create a search query, that for example searches all my feeds for the word “Linux” and stores them on the left as one category.

On a per-feed basis, I can also change the way the feed is displayed on the view (Liferea gives the option of Normal-view, Wide-view and Combined View). It might seem like a triviality right now, but you’ll see how cool that is once you use it.

More? Liferea supports reading through comments (this is supported by the feeds using the <wfw:commentRss> tag, which atleast wordpress.com’s have by default). I’ve observed that this is a little buggy as for some reason it doesn’t seem to be working well with the feed for my own blog, but works fine for most others.

And all this in a very simple and intuitive interface, which is quite light (right now taking about 27MB in main memory).

Liferea unfortunately stands for Linux Fead Reader — unfortunate, because it seems to be ported to everything, right from Windows and Macs to a Nokia N770.

Ubuntu should definitely make this a part of its standard desktop install.

Three cheers to its developer Lars Lindner.

RediffBol-prpl 0.2.0

Yaay, I coded a nearly-fully functional Protocol plugin in just about a week (0.2.0 is now released)! All thanks to the Binu Paul’s RTalk, this version uses the proprietary RBol protocol, instead of the older HTTP protocol that I had used in my older version. I had got queries regarding my first version (which I had officially *released* last week), so I expect that there are actually a few people out there who use RediffBol. I would consider the last 24*7 hours well-spent if even one person uses it :)

This version seems to be nearly bug-free, very stable. I don’t use my Rediffmail account for chatting, but am definitely looking forward for friends on it, so that even I can use my plugin :D (add me on arn_2000 AT rediffmail DOT com). As a matter of fact, till date I have never opened the official RediffBol client, since it does not even run using wine under linux. All testing and experimentation was done using RTalk.

There’s this other reason as to why its useful for me, and maybe many others who have migrated from Rediffmail to other mail clients. Yep, you guessed it, it informs you when you receive new mail!

Further reading: Project homepage at http://rediffbol-prpl.sourceforge.net/. Especially read the section on what works and what does not work.

Also see Binu Paul’s posts on RTalk at http://bpaulstechblog.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html